As we mentioned in a previous article, Red Hat advocate Greg DeKoenigsberg claimed that due to the much larger amount of code it's contributed, Red Hat is a better open source citizen than Canonical, adding, "Canonical is a marketing organization masquerading as an engineering organization." A Computerworld blog retorts that that's no insult; and that marketing Linux could be just as important to the cause as contributing code. Updated

After 6 years running Canonical, they are still not making money as far as I know. They haven't added much of worth to the desktop either, despite getting all the credit.

Udev was done by a former Novell guy, working now with Google - that was the big one that Ubuntu profited from. They became "the first distro to ship project utopia" despite doing nothing to actually assist in that work.

Name anything else you use on a DAILY basis, or things that actually assist in making your life easier on Linux... nothing that adds to the experience of Linux on the desktop has actually come from Ubuntu, nothing. All they've done is added around the edges, and allowed proprietary drivers by default.

Well, I'm not pro Canonical or anything. I'm just saying that I think they've done a good job (as in better than anyone else before) in pushing Linux on the desktop. To compete with Red Hat for enterprise customers though, they will have a hard sell. Would you rather buy your services from a company that can actually fix problems for you (Red Hat), or one that has to wait for them to be fixed upstream (Canonical)? Red Hat's comments on Canonical's lack of upstream contributions underlines this for existing/potential customers, which again is what I believe was the whole point of Red Hat starting this debate to begin with.

To be clear, Red hat didn't start this discussion, an ex-redhatter did, Greg no longer works with the company.

I hate Ubuntu much less than I used to simply because I realize what you're saying is true, though. Canonical is attracting nothing of value to Linux. All they're attracting are users, and very few that actually know what they're doing stick around. Even less ever actually pay a dime to Canonical. In fact, I think the only source of income to speak of for Canonical is coming via the development deal with Google.

Anyone actually looking to do anything serious with Linux is still going to Red Hat with their business, which is definitely a good thing.

Don't be too quick to dismiss things "added around the edges". It only takes a couple buttons not working or a few mysterious errors (easy to correct if you launch from a terminal and read stdout, or know which config file to tweak!) to drive Joe Average away from Linux, possibly for good. It is precisely dismissing this kind of low-value problem that keeps Linux from desktop penetration. The only distros I know that have cared about it are Ubuntu and SuSE, of all people.